Outdoors - Gone

   It is not unusual for the songbirds that normally hang around our houses to disappear during extremely hot weather. I think they go into the heavy timber and wait for the weather to break. It has been a bit different this year. As typical, when it got hot, the bird left, but when the cooler weather returned, the birds did not.

   Several of my readers wrote to me asking what was going on. I am not sure. Bluebirds, hummingbirds, orioles and purple martins all left about the same time, during the hot spell. Since it has returned to more normal temperatures, we have one family of bluebirds. I saw the parents feeding three young lined up on a branch in a nearby oak tree. The “babies” were almost as big as their parents but continued to beg for food. Before the heat wave, we had six or eight pairs living in the area.

   Six hummingbirds are back of the countless ones we had before. When the temperature was near or over a hundred degrees, the sugar water we feed them would ferment in a day or two. On more than one occasion, we saw hummingbirds that appeared to be intoxicated. One almost ran into me and crashed into the window behind me. It looked a bit dazed and groggy for a minute and finally took off again. All the orioles and martins have stayed away. My only guess is the weather was too hot for too long and most of the songbirds migrated further north.

   In the last few days, there has been another unexplained disappearance. Damon, our son, called to tell us he bought a new machine to turn his tomatoes into tomato juice. It sounded interesting, so my wife and I drove over to his place to check it out. He was well on his way of turning a whole sink full of ripe tomatoes into juice with his nifty little machine. A tomato is quartered, run through it and juice comes out of the one side while everything else goes the other way. It was fun to watch, and I even got to participate. While quartering the tomatoes, I noticed one in particular that was perfect in size, ripeness and texture. It was just too good to turn into juice. It needed to be made into a BLT. It was one of those that one thick slice would cover a slice of bread. I set it aside to take home with us. On arrival at home, I placed my prized tomato on the coffee table on the porch. We would have sandwiches for lunch the next day.

   I got up early the next morning, poured a cup of coffee, and went out to enjoy the cool morning while watching the deer on their morning routine. When I placed my cup on the table, I noticed my tomato was gone. I looked all around. It had not rolled off the table, and there was no sign of seeds or juice as though something had eaten it. It had simply disappeared. Jag, the terrier, has been known to eat tomatoes, but I do not think he could have done the job and leave no evidence. No other animal would get onto the porch past Jag and I do not think a human prowler would risk their life for a tomato.

   It is another of life’s great mysteries. Whether it be birds or tomatoes, they are just gone.